Friday, January 5, 2018

Mueller investigation has become continuation of Democrats' failed 2016 political campaign against Trump. No proof of claims is ever provided but maybe it's not about proof, just trying to hobble a highly effective conservative president-IBD Editoral, 1/4/18

"The demonization of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia is
just the most dangerous feature of this propaganda process – and this is
where the neocons and the liberal interventionists most significantly
come together.The U.S. media’s approach to Russia is now virtually 100
percent propaganda. Does any sentient human being read the New York
Times’ or the Washington Post’s coverage of Russia and think that he or
she is getting a neutral or unbiased treatment of the facts? For
instance, the full story of the infamous Magnitsky case cannot be told in the West, nor can the objective reality of the Ukrane coup in 2014.
The American people and the West in general are carefully shielded from
hearing the “other side of the story.”Indeed to even suggest that
there is another side to the story makes you a “Putin apologist” or
“Kremlin stooge.”

Western journalists now apparently see it as their patriotic duty to
hide key facts that otherwise would undermine the demonizing of Putin
and Russia. Ironically, many “liberals” who cut their teeth on
skepticism about the Cold War and the bogus justifications for the
Vietnam War now insist that we must all accept whatever the U.S.
intelligence community feeds us, even if we’re told to accept the
assertions on faith.

The hatred of Trump and Putin was so intense that old-fashioned rules
of journalism and fairness were brushed aside. On a personal note, I
faced harsh criticism even from friends of many years for refusing to
enlist in the anti-Trump “Resistance.” The argument was that Trump was
such a unique threatto America and the world that I should join in
finding any justification for his ouster. Some people saw my insistence
on the same journalistic standards that I had always employed somehow a
betrayal.

Other people, including senior editors across the mainstream media,
began to treat the unproven Russia-gate allegations as flat fact. No
skepticism was tolerated and mentioning the obvious bias among the never-Trumpers
inside the FBI, Justice Department and intelligence community was
decried as an attack on the integrity of the U.S. government’s
institutions.

Anti-Trump “progressives” were posturing as the true
patriots because of their now unquestioning acceptance of the
evidence-free proclamations of the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement
agencies....

I actually believed that the point of journalism in a democracy was
to give the voters unbiased information and the necessary context so the
voters could make up their own minds and use their ballot – as
imperfect as that is – to direct the politicians to take actions on
behalf of the nation. The unpleasant reality that the past year has
brought home to me is that a shockingly small number of people in
Official Washington and the mainstream news media actually believe in
real democracy or the goal of an informed electorate.

Whether they would admit it or not, they believe in a “guided
democracy” in which “approved” opinions are elevated – regardless of
their absence of factual basis – and “unapproved” evidence is brushed
aside or disparaged regardless of its quality. Everything becomes
“information warfare” – whether on Fox News, the Wall Street Journal
editorial page, MSNBC, the New York Times or the Washington Post.
Instead of information provided evenhandedly to the public, it is
rationed out in morsels designed to elicit the desired emotional
reactions and achieve a political outcome."...